Vermeer's The Concert

Friday, December 01, 2017

Inside The Gardner Museum Heist, The Biggest Unsolved Art Theft In History

On March 18, 1990, the greatest art theft in history was pulled off
at Boston’s Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum. Estimates put the value of
the 13 stolen pieces between $300 and $500 million, and the case remains
unsolved to this day. Though it may seem like they only happen in
movies, art thefts are fairly common. With famous paintings valued in
the multi-millions, art theft is lucrative business for criminals, who
either ransom the artworks back to their owners or sell them for big
money on the black market. According to ABC, tens of thousands of works of art are stolen yearly, and Interpol says on its website the market for stolen art is “becoming as lucrative as those for drugs, weapons and counterfeit goods.”
The Isabella Stewart Gardner sits just south of The Fens, the
Frederick Law Olmsted-designed green space which gives its name to the
nearby ballpark of the Boston Red Sox. Founded in 1903 by wealthy art
collector and philanthropist Isabella Stewart Gardner, the museum
consists of her personal art collection and is housed in an intimate
setting, designed to emulate a Venetian Renaissance palace. It contains
pieces from antiquity up to the 19th century from every
corner of the world and includes important works by Michelangelo,
Botticelli and Rembrandt, among many others.
At 1:24 AM on the morning of March 18, 1990, as the previous days’
Saint Patrick’s Day reveries died down, two men in police uniforms rang
the buzzer at the Gardner Museum. They said they were responding to
reports of a disturbance. Once inside, they handcuffed the two security
guards, explained this was a robbery, and locked them in the museum’s
basement.
Over the next 81 minutes, the thieves handpicked some of the museum’s
most important pieces of art, while leaving other equally valuable
pieces alone. Among the stolen works
were three pieces by Dutch master Rembrandt, one of only 34 known
paintings by Vermeer, a painting by 1800s impressionist Manet and a
series of drawings by Edgar Degas.
The museum’s trustees initially offered a $1 million reward for
information leading to an arrest or the work’s return, later raising the
amount to $5 million, at the behest of the FBI, according to a March 1998 feature in Vanity Fair.
That same feature claimed the robbery may have been committed by
Boston-area career criminals Robert Donati and David Houghton. The only
problem was both men were dead: Donati from a 1991 gangland slaying and
Houghton from a heart attack the following year.
The FBI has pursued numerous leads over the years related to the
case, but have yet to find the missing artworks. In March 18, 2013, 23
years to the day of the original robbery, they announced they knew the
identities of the two thieves who pulled of the Gardner Museum heist,
though they refused to name them.
“We’ve determined in the years after the theft that the art was
transported to the Connecticut and Philadelphia regions. But we haven’t
identified where the art is right now,” special agent Richard
DesLauriers was quoted in The New York Times at the time.
Since 2012, the FBI has been engaged in a battle of wills with
small-time Connecticut Mafia associate Robert Gentile. The 81-year-old
has been in prison for the last four and a half years on drug and gun
charges in hopes of pressuring him to reveal what he knows about the
theft, after he was incriminated by the widow of a fellow gangster. In
late September 2017, a judge ordered a competency evaluation for
Gentile, according to the Hartford Courant.
In 2015, the US Attorney’s Office released newly discovered security
camera footage from the night before the robbery, which they believe may
have been a practice run. A source close to the investigation told the website Boston.com that
one of the two men in the video was Richard Abath, who was one of the
two security guards on duty the night of the robbery. Abath, however,
denies any involvement, and has been repeatedly questioned by the FBI.
Last June, Dutch private investigator Arthur Brand told CBS Boston he
was negotiating for the return of the paintings, which he believed were
in Ireland, possibly in the possession of former members of the Irish
Republican Army.
In May of this year, The New York Times reported that
the board of trustees of the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum had raised
the reward for the stolen items recovery to $10 million.
“We encourage anyone with information to contact the museum directly,
and we guarantee complete confidentiality,” the museum’s security
director Anthony Amore said in a statement. The offer expires at the end
of the year. The stolen paintings' picture frames still hang on the
walls of the museum where they originally were, forlornly awaiting their
one-day return.

Judge Will Not Free Gardner Heist Suspect Robert Gentile

Robert Gentile,
the Hartford mobster, is wheeled into a waiting vehicle at the federal
courthouse in Hartford. He is suspected of concealing information about
the $500 million art heist at Boston's Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum.
(Patrick Raycraft / Hartford Courant)

A federal judge on Wednesday refused to
release Gardner museum heist person of interest Robert Gentile to home
confinement and dismissed his claim that federal authorities are
tormenting him by shuttling him between penal institutions.
The 82-year-old Hartford
mobster, who is being held while awaiting sentencing on gun charges,
was ordered moved to a North Carolina prison medical center in late
September for a mental competency examination. Last week, after the
judge on his case inquired about the examination, authorities disclosed
that it had been delayed and Gentile was waiting in a federal prison in
New York City.
Between September and last week, Gentile lawyer A. Ryan McGuigan said Gentile had been moved from a state jail in Bridgeport
to a federal jail in Rhode Island to a New York prison. He complained
that the shuttling between prisons amounts to “cruel and unusual
punishment.”
Federal prosecutors said in a court filing that
Gentile has been moved around because of transportation delays.
Initially, a bed was not available at the medical institution and, when
one opened, Gentile’s flight was canceled. They said Gentile flew to
North Carolina on a commercial flight Tuesday.

The
FBI believes Gentile is concealing information about the 1990 robbery
of $500 million in art — including a Rembrandt and a Vermeer — from
Boston’s Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum.
Gentile denies knowing
anything about the art or the heist. But he has been under extraordinary
law enforcement pressure since 2010, when the widow of one of his mob
partners told investigators that she saw him with two of the stolen
pieces several years earlier.
Gentile has complained his arrests
since for a succession of drug and gun offenses are a futile effort by
law enforcement to press him to share information he does not have.
Federal authorities have replied that they have several, surreptitious
recordings made by informants and undercover operatives on which Gentile
says he has knowledge of or access to the art.
In the public
portion of the government’s legal filing, prosecutors said that Gentile,
who suffers from a variety of ailments, appears to be in generally good
health. They said he was examined in New York “and it was determined
that the defendant’s medical condition is stable other having what is
referenced in the examination report as Nasopharyngitis, that is … a
common cold.”
He was to have been sentenced on the weapons charges
in September, but the hearing was postponed after McGuigan expressed
concerns that extended incarceration has eroded Gentile’s mental acuity
and he may have difficulty understanding the the charges against him and
assisting in his defense. At that point, U.S. District Judge Robert N.
Chatigny ordered the competency examination, Gentile’s second.
An earlier examination, more than a year before, found him competent.

Wednesday, November 01, 2017

Sean Hicks, nephew of Winter Hill Gang founder, is writing a script for film about the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum heist

Sean Hicks has been out of prison for a little more than a year,
which is the longest consecutive period of freedom he's had since he was
incarcerated 20 years ago.
In that time, Hicks has moved to downtown Worcester, partially as a
way to get a fresh start, and partially as a way to distance himself
from his associations with the notorious Irish crime syndicates in
Boston, specifically the one his uncle, Howie Winter, once led: The
Winter Hill Gang.
As part of his probation, Hicks is no longer allowed to communicate with anyone in organized crime, including his uncle.
"I've given my life to the streets and half my life in prison, and
I'm only 46," Hicks said. "Why does my uncle live in Millbury now?
Because there's nothing left to prove in Boston. The days of traditional
crime are over."
When he was 29-year-old, Hicks was put away for 10 years for his
involvement in the Sept. 25, 2000 brutal stabbing of 22-year-old Celtics
forward Paul Pierce. Hicks was part of the Boston-based hip-hop group
Made Men, several members of which were found guilty of stabbing Pierce
11 times in the face, neck, and back at the Buzz Club, a late night
dance club in the Boston Theater District. Pierce had to undergo lung surgery to repair the damage.

He would end up serving an additional five years in prison between
2011 and 2016 for shooting in South Boston of two Chinese gangsters,
Hicks said.
According to prison records obtained by MassLive, Hicks was accused
of committing a "racially-toned" stabbing during one of his prison
stays. Prison officials wrote that because of Hicks' high propensity for
violence and long-standing associations to organized crime, he should
be kept in maximum security prison.
He was released nearly a year ago, and he says he's been focusing most of his time on leaving his violent past behind.
"This is the longest period I've ever made it out of prison. At
times, it's overwhelming. It seems I've never been able to escape my
past. It's kind of hard to change people's preconceived perception of
you," Hicks said. "But I'm fortunate because I've met my wife, my older
daughter is in my life again, and I've been able to rekindle doing the
things I love."
During that time, he has remarried, reconnected with his family and begun work writing and attempting to sell his life's story.
More specifically, Hicks is focusing on getting production started on
a film based on a script he wrote about the infamous unsolved Isabella
Stewart Gardner Museum heist called "No Loose Ends.

After 27 years, the heist remains the highest valued theft of private
property in history, with $500 million still missing, and according to
Hicks' attorney, Torin Dorros, many in the entertainment industry are
interested in the story.
"The story and Sean's involvement are pretty well known across
industries, including major players in the entertainment world. There is
already a fair amount of interest, and we are actively talking with
writers and producers on how to most effectively tell the story," Dorros
said.
These days, Hicks can be found at The Grid in downtown Worcester. He
likes to frequent The Brew, a cafe where he can often be found in the
middle of the day drinking a beer and meeting with his family, business
associates or lawyers.
He's got the look of a man who has spent more than 15 years in
prison. Sleeves of tattoo ride up and down his arms and circle his neck.
Three inky teardrops lay underneath one of his eyes.
Despite the worry-lines and wrinkles that adorn his face, Hicks often
wears a big smile on his face, the kind of smile that says "I'm capable
of anything."
Hicks recently teamed up with two experienced Hollywood writers,
Samuel Franco and Evan Kilgore. The writers are currently working on the
upcoming film, "Mayday 109," about the sinking of John F. Kennedy's PT
boat in World War II. Ansel Elgort, the star of "Baby Driver," signed on to play Kennedy in July.
Hicks is also receiving legal representation from Brown & Rosen, a
law firm with experience representing entertainment clients, such as
the United Nations Association Film Festival and several artists that
appeared on "Making the Band," "Love and Hip Hop" and "R&B Divas,"
according to the firm's site.
Dorros said getting Hicks' story published comes with several risks
and challenges, specifically because the script could implicate numerous
parties, potentially causing a stir in the Boston criminal underground.
When asked about what his uncle thought of the script, Hicks said he is
no longer allowed to speak with him or anyone else involved with
organized crime due to his probation.
"I want to bring his story to the world, but we do tread cautiously
only because he has a special history," Dorros said. "The only concern
is that we want to always make sure that third parties, whether that's
news agencies or investigators or otherwise, don't take things the wrong
way."
Hicks started writing his life's story roughly five years ago. He was
inspired to start writing after receiving a copy of Stephen King's book
"On Writing," while in prison.
This period of writing and self-reflection gave him the resolve to
turn his back on criminal life and turn his stories into something of
substance.
"I finally grew up and matured. I've always given my life to my
family and done what's right by the streets, at my own peril. I just
turned 46 and decided I've done enough: It's time for me," Hicks said.
While Hicks was away, Whitey Bulger, the notorious head of the Winter
Hill Gang, was arrested after dodging authorities for 16 years and
started talking to investigators.
Records from the Massachusetts Correctional Institution-Cedar
Junction acquired by MassLive indicate that Bulger linked Hicks and his
uncle to the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum art heist.
According to those records, prison authorities were aware and worried
that Hicks was working on a script and other related media about the
Isabella Gardner heist. Prison authorities were hoping to keep him in
maximum security status for reasons relating to his writing and a
reported stabbing incident that took place between Hicks and another
inmate.
When Hicks heard that Bulger had linked him and Winter to the largest
art heist in the history of the world, he was not surprised.
"He's been ratting people out since the '50s. Once a rat always a rat," Hicks said.
He said Bulger knew he was never going to receive a plea deal, but
was hoping to keep his girlfriend, Catherine Greig, out of prison. For
this reason, Bulger informed on several of his associates, Hicks said.
Despite being linked to the unsolved heist, Hicks said he has never been questioned about any possible involvement in the crime.
"He knew he was never going to get a plea, but he was trying to keep
Catherine out of prison. That would be a last ditch act of humanity,"
Hicks said.
The indignant act of writing a script about a crime Boston's most
notorious gangster connected him to fits Hicks' aggressive and risky
persona.
The script is in many ways a defiant response to the many reporters
and writers who have attempted, and failed, in Hicks' opinion, to
capture the truth about what really happened on March 18, 1990.
He said he was inspired to write a story about the heist after
reading Boston Globe reporter Stephen Kurkjian's "Master Thieves: The
Boston Gangsters Who Pulled Off the World's Greatest Art Heist." That
book, and the works of Boston Herald reporter Howie Carr pushed Hicks to
"set the record straight" on the heist.
"A reporter for the Globe came up with the idea for a movie and wrote
a novel and a few people inside and outside of prison weren't happy
about the novel he wrote, and I agreed with them. I just thought, 'I can
do better than that,'" Hicks said. "If you have a story coming out, you
don't want to get it wrong because you can get a lot of people on the
streets in trouble."
Hicks calls his version of events a "hypothetical," but his
hypothetical is backed by decades of life growing up the Boston
underworld.
Hicks thinks it was a setup, a scheme to get rid of two troublesome gangsters and maybe get away with some priceless art.
The Italian Mafia, Hicks claims, was commissioned by a wealthy broker
to pull off the heist. The mafia tried to take advantage of the
situation by sending in two members they believed to working with
police.
If the robbers failed, which is what the mafia expected, they would
be taken to prison. If by some miracle they pulled it off, the mafia
would have an excuse to "cut the loose ends," Hicks said.
The script will tell the story of the planning, execution and direct
aftermath of the heist based on Hicks' theory. The title of the film,
"No Loose Ends," references the mafia's intent to kill people connected
to crimes in order to squash an investigation.
"Everything in the mob is compartmentalized. You can't just get rid
of two guys because you want to get rid of two guys. They were sent in
on a suicide mission," Hicks said.
Production on the film is expected to begin summer 2018, Hicks said. Part of the film is expected to be filmed in WorcesterAttorney's from Hicks' legal team said they could not disclose actors
being approached for the film, but said they are reaching out to
several recognizable Boston area stars.
In the meantime, Hicks is continuing to work on revitalizing his
music career and publishing a 76,000-word manuscript loosely based off
of his life in organized crime. He's working on an album with the
Worcester-based band Four Year Strong.
This next period of his life is like a second-act for Hicks, a chance
to give meaning and substance to his destructive criminal past.
"When you start going away when you're 17, 18, 19, you end up
spending your life in prison ... Now I've got nothing left to do with my
life other than try to make something of my past," Hicks said

FBI Special Agent Geoff Kelly is optimistic he will solve what some consider the most famous art-heist case in history.
It’s
been 27 years since about $500 million of art was stolen from the
Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston, but that amount of time is a
“drop in the bucket” compared to the amount of time it has taken for
other art to be recovered, he said.
Kelly spoke at the Chrysler Museum of Art on Wednesday at an event held by the FBI called “Nothing Sketchy.”
He’s
been on the case since 2002 and said he never imagined that 15 years
later he would still be trying to find the missing art.
On March
18, 1990, two thieves dressed as police officers, talked their way into
the museum by claiming to be responding to a broken window, then tied up
the two guards, and stole 13 pieces of art.
Among the works:
three Rembrandts, including his only known seascape, Vermeer’s “The
Concert” and works by Degas, Manet and Flinck.
Today, empty frames hang on the wall where the pieces were once displayed.
Kelly speaks about the case around the country to try to get the word out.
“The
fact that I’m here talking at all about a case that’s open and pending
in the bureau is kind of unusual,” Kelly told the audience of about 100.
“But this is an unusual case.”
The museum is offering a $10 million reward for information leading to the recovery of the works, according to its website.
Kelly said he has traveled the world to investigate tips and is confident the art will one day be returned.
Authorities
have for years been pressuring Robert Gentile, an 81-year-old reputed
Connecticut mobster for information on the art, the agent said. Gentile
is incarcerated and awaiting sentencing on federal gun charges,
according to The Boston Globe. He previously served time on drug and
other gun charges. The Globe reported in September that Gentile’s
sentencing was postponed because of questions about his competency. A
judge scheduled a hearing to November, The Globe said.
Kelly has been with the FBI for 22 years, mostly investigating violent crime and art theft.
He
said he was one of the original members of the FBI’s elite Art Crime
Team and has recovered more than $70 million in stolen art and antiques.
Kelly also said he tracked down one of Tom Brady’s Super Bowl jerseys
when it was stolen.
Kelly encouraged the public to reach out to
the FBI or the museum if they know anything about the Gardner case. The
Boston FBI office can be reached at 857-386-2000 and the museum’s
director of security can be reached at 617-278-5114.

Sunday, October 01, 2017

The ‘Sociopath’ Scholar Who Made Films of His Crimes Tried to Confess to America’s Most Famous Art Heist

Out
of Rikers and facing a bank robbery charge in Providence, he’s trying
to complete his masterpiece of ‘autobiographical fiction’ that began
with buying a dime bag.

“Don’t spoil a good story by telling the truth.”—Isabella Gardner, founder of Boston’s Gardner Museum.

In February 2017, Joe Gibbons sat in a Greenwich Village restaurant and calmly confessed to a role in the largest art heist in American history.
Gibbons, a filmmaker and former MIT lecturer now in his mid-sixties—back in circulation after pleading guilty in 2014 to a Manhattan
bank robbery and spending a year in jail—had already confessed and
would soon be charged with another bank robbery, this one in Providence,
Rhode Island.
He
was sitting with a Pulitzer-winning journalist, Stephen Kurkjian, and a
novelist, Charles Pinning, both of whom had traveled from New England
and knocked on his door that afternoon. Their visit came weeks after an
assistant U.S. attorney in Massachusetts had called Gibbons’ lawyer to inquire about his possible involvement in the Isabella Gardner Museum heist.
In March of 1990, a security guard at the Boston museum let
in two thieves dressed as police officers who proceeded to steal $500
million worth of art, including works by Rembrandt, Vermeer, and Degas. The guard, who now lives in Vermont, was never charged and has long denied any involvement in the heist.
Twenty-seven
years later, Gibbons, chasing a morning’s worth of Jameson down with a
Kir Royal, was toasted—“well lubricated,” he calls it—and ready to
confess.

Soon
after midnight on the morning following St. Patrick’s Day, 1990,
Gibbons told his audience of two, he was at the Gardner Museum, to score
a dime-dag from a security guard there he’d bought from before.The guard told him to walk with him into the closed museum’s
Blue Room with the promise of a dime bag, he said. There, several
masterpieces were spread across the floor. “I don’t know how to get them out of the frames,” he says the security guard told him. He stomped on Rembrandt’s Christ in the Storm on the Sea of Galilee, the artist’s only known seascape.
“That’s not the way to do it!” Gibbons yelled.
The guard threw another piece of art on the floor, a Rembrandt sketch. “Do you want this one? Do you want this one?” he teased.
Gibbons
rejected the offer, he said, in part because he “wasn’t a big fan of
Rembrandt” but helped the guard pull off the caper. “I showed how you could remove the backings of the paintings and take the canvases out.”
His
wife walked into the restaurant, and cut the interview short, not
wanting her husband’s name attached to still another crime even as he
faces possible jail time for the Providence robbery. So Gibbons wrapped
it up, saying that he’d run out of the museum with a dime bag and
without any of the paintings.
Still, he had confessed, before two writers to his role in the white whale of a crime that’s filled decades of newspaper columninches, TV-newsairtime and the pages of non-fictionbooks with speculation about who done it.
Asked
about his involvement with Gibbons, Kurkjian told me in July that “I’m
no longer working with him and have asked that he not associate me with
the reporting any longer.” Pinning refused comment. ***
But
what to make of the confession of a criminal and artist who’s dedicated
both careers to his “autobiographical fiction” propagating the myth of
Joe Gibbons, artist, filmmaker and self-alleged criminal mastermind?
Gibbons
began to cultivate that myth in Oakland, 1977. Then in his early
twenties, he moved to the Bay Area after attending Antioch College in
Ohio. He was welcomed into the art scene and began making films. He also
kickstarted his career as a petty criminal.
The
intersection of his two careers garnered press attention when
Gibbons—well-lubricated at the time—grabbed a painting off the wall of
the Oakland Museum during an opening party for artist Richard
Diebenkorn.
Gibbons shoved the painting beneath his
coat, and waltzed past hundreds of party guests and the museum’s
security. The police tracked him down, but rather than go quietly, he
seized the opportunity.
He was a member of a renegade
group of six artists called the “Art Liberation Front,” Gibbons claimed.
The Front had a manifesto, dreamt up by Gibbons: They were critical of
the arbitrary value placed on a piece of art—but they were also
publicity hungry.
“We’re inveterate opportunists,” Gibbons told the Berkeley Barb after the theft.
“Our philosophy is full of contradictions. It had nothing to do with
Diebenkorn—it was about museums in general. We saw the opportunity for
some publicity and we grabbed it.
“Basically we’re
creating meta-art, which is art about art,” he told the paper. “We are
whimsically critical of the art establishment as well as the art-critic
contingent, who view art solely in terms of its commodity function—its
exchange value versus its use value.”
By their logic,
the frame was the only piece of a painting that had any actual value.
Before the police caught up with him, The Front agreed they would return
the painting, but keep the frame hostage. One of their ransom demands,
the group told the Barb, was for the Oakland Museum to hold an exhibition with nothing but frames.
That
crime, which Gibbons unquestionably committed, might draw someone to
believe he could’ve somehow been involved in the famous Gardner Museum
heist. Beyond the obvious art-crime connection, there are the frames. On
that early March morning in 1990, the Gardner Museum thieves cut the
paintings out and left the frames—which still hang there, with nothing
in them.

Ben Feuerherd

I
first connected with Gibbons through a Facebook message this summer.
I’d seen a news alert about a bank robbery in downtown Manhattan, and
Gibbons, who I’d covered as a reporter, popped into my head. I messaged
him, hoping to find out how he’d adjusted after jail. When we met
Washington Square Park on a recent afternoon, he recounted the story of
the two writers who knocked on his door in February, and produced a
recording of his confession.
“It’s an old myth the
artist has to have experiences, which he can then use for his material,”
Gibbons told me between sips from a can of bubbly wine. His gray hair
was unkempt and long on the sides. He has few teeth left in his mouth.
“When
I was a teenager, I thought I was innocent and protected, my
upbringing,” he said. “I needed to really get dirty. Get my hands
dirty.”
In his films, Gibbons’ combined his dry wit and intellect with transgressive material.
“He
was always flirting with a certain amount of criminality. It was always
one of his subjects,” said noted film critic Jim Hoberman, who was one
of the first journalists to write about Gibbons’ work. “He was already
notorious for having stolen that painting” from the Oakland Museum.
Gibbons’
contemporaries in late 1970s and early 1980s in New York were creating
overtly sexual films in a trumped-up John Waters’ style, Hoberman said.
Gibbons,
on the other hand, was also exploring taboo subjects, but with wit and
nuance. “He was transgressive in a way that was much more interesting to
me,” Hoberman said. “His films were just much more interesting,
conceptually and visually. I was very supportive of them. I thought he
was doing something new.”
In his 1978 film, Spying,
for example, Gibbons secretly recorded his neighbors in San Francisco
as they sunbathed, gardened, kissed one another, and did other routine
tasks.
The film flirted with the taboo of voyeurism, but also commented on American daily life.
When
it was screened by the film society of Lincoln Center in 2012, they
published critiques of the film by Hoberman and filmmakers who knew
Gibbons’ work.
“It’s an aggressive film in its Rear
Window quality,” wrote artist Peggy Ahwesh, “but also a film that
exposes the pathos of a loner as he gazes on to the lives of others who
are active, have relationships, lovers, pets and manage to accomplish
the small tasks of daily life. Spying is the ultimate home movie.”
Away from the camera, Gibbons continued to find new material in his own criminality.
After
the Oakland Museum theft, Gibbons began stealing books at shops along
Telegraph Avenue near the University of Berkeley’s campus, in part to
pay for lawyer fees, he said. He would also steal champagne, his drink
of choice.
The book thefts were a clever scam, Gibbons
said. He would take an academic book from a shop and immediately flip it
at another store, sometimes for a several-hundred dollar payout.
He
went on to plead guilty in 1979 to a felony for stealing the Diebenkorn
painting, and was offered a deal to complete a drug-treatment program
in lieu of a prison sentence.
“The court gave me the opportunity of spending a year in a therapeutic community, or a year in Santa Rita jail,” he said.
Gibbons,
raised in Providence, moved back to the East Coast and entered the
McLean Psychiatric Hospital. When he completed the program in 1980, he
spent a short time in a New York City halfway house and reverted back to
his petty crimes, he said.
“The triggers were still
there. I immediately went back to stealing books,” he said. “I was, as I
say, conducting research, having experiences I could later distill into
art.”
After five months in New York, Gibbons moved to
Boston, where his avant-garde film career flourished as he made films
based on his actual experiences, conflated for effect. “I used the
circumstances that I found myself in as a base for fiction,” he said.
As he racked up parking tickets in Boston and in Rhode Island in the 1980s, his film A Fugitive in Paris opens with him jumping out of a window, running from the Boston Police after him because of them.
The film also goes on to explore another crime Gibbons had yet to commit at that point in his life: bank robbery.
His
work in this period would be shown in New York’s Museum of Modern Art
and the Whitney Biennial. He won a Guggenheim Fellowship and received a
range of praise and criticism from critics.
His most acclaimed work, Confessions of a Sociopath,
was released in 2001. It includes a number of old recordings, shot at
various points in Gibbons’ life, that show him appearing to break the
law in different ways. In one scene he shoots heroin; in another he
steals a book.
Gibbons earned the Guggenheim Fellowship
soon after the film was released and started the most stable job he ever
held: a lecturing position at MIT.
“I had ruled out teaching, but I’d gotten an MFA because the only way I could finish my film, The Genius was by getting a staffer’s loan,” he said.
He
would spend nearly a decade in the lecturing role in MIT’s Art,
Culture, and Technology program, but was forced to leave in 2010 because
he didn’t earn tenure.
“I would’ve liked to continue there,” he said. “Nine years is the limit for a not-tenured.”
Gibbons
returned to producing avant-garde films full time after he left MIT,
but struggled to achieve the same success he had earlier in his career.
In
November 2014, Gibbons walked into a Providence bank, stood in line,
passed the teller a robbery note and walked away with almost $3,000, he
said.
“I could just go in and stand in line. That’s what
allowed me to follow through with it,” he recounted. “So I went through
with it and it worked out as I imagined it.”
Gibbons’ fascination with crime was part of his motive, he said.
“Bank
robbery was something that always had a mystique that represented to me
the pinnacle of criminal achievement,” he said. “It sort’ve represented
an achievement because it’s sort of the opposite of the way I was
raised.”
After the Providence bank robbery, Gibbons
traveled to New York, where he says he stayed in budget hotels in
downtown Manhattan and drank heavily.
Weeks later, he was again out of money and options, he said.
“I
ran out of people I could ask for money. I had to leave the place I was
staying because either I couldn’t afford it or I wasn’t welcome there
anymore,” he said. “What would be more stressful? Going to the men’s
shelter at Bellevue or robbing a bank?”
He answered his
own question by walking into a bank in Manhattan’s Chinatown on the
afternoon of New Year’s Eve day 2014, standing in line before passing
the teller a note demanding cash. Another customer happened to walk up
to the counter at the same time and distracted the bank attendant. To
refocus the attendant’s attention, Gibbons lifted his hands onto the
counter and revealed a small video camera recording his heist, in which
he walked off with $1,002.
After he was arrested days
later, Gibbons told the NYPD he’d committed the Manhattan bank robbery,
and also the one he’s now charged with in Providence. He pleaded guilty
in the New York case in July 2015, and was sentenced to a year in jail
with credit for the six months he had already served.
When
Gibbons walked out of Rikers Island in September of 2015, he hoped he
was due for a big promotion in his entwined film and petty crime
careers.
His arrest had made a splash in the press after
the New York tabloids first reported the crime. The story would go on
to be covered in The New York Times, People magazine, and in an exhaustive Boston magazine profile. A documentary film crew even wanted to capture his post-incarceration life through their lens.
The myth of Joe Gibbons was growing again.
He
earned a new nickname in jail—Joey Banks—that’s now the greeting on his
cellphone voicemail. He’s identified himself as a “bank
robber/insurgent artist” on LinkedIn.
Maybe he could write a book. Or make a movie out of this.
But catch up with Gibbons today and he doesn’t seem like an artist poised to make a comeback.
Since
his release, he’s married Deb Meehan, also a filmmaker who currently
teaches at Pratt University and who he’s known for decades. There’s
visible friction between them, as she works to get him sober and keep
him out of jail, and he drinks, confesses to crimes, and recounts his
criminal past to reporters.
Gibbons was charged in the
Providence robbery in July, pleaded not guilty, and posted a $50,000
bond, a Rhode Island court spokesperson said.
He shares a
Greenwich Village apartment with Meehan, not far from a liquor depot
where he buys boxed and canned wine. He carried a tote bag to fill on a
recent afternoon trip to the store, and paid for the wine with what he
said was his wife’s credit card, instead of pocketing it like he
might’ve done years ago.
Even drunk and down on his
luck, he transitions seamlessly in conversation from tales of his bank
robberies to critiques of the Austrian philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein.
And he still flirts with crime as material.
“I’m
just out and about, practicing my trade,” he said in a recent email,
attaching a photo of himself inside a Chase bank, holding up a deposit
slip. “Robbery—large bills only,” was scribbled on it.
He signed the email: “Joey Banks.”
But
drunk or sober, Gibbons’ eyes light up when he talks about the Gardner
Museum. Like the writers who sat with him in February, he saw
opportunity in his possible involvement in the famous heist. Not for
cutting a deal with the U.S. attorney for a reduced sentence in his
Providence bank-robbing case. Not for finally solving the decades-old
mystery. But for an autobiographical fiction film. For rekindling the
myth of Joe Gibbons.
“It was just better than gold,” he said, recounting his February confession.
Gibbons
took a trip to the Gardner Museum with his wife after the interview,
and playfully posed in front of the frame of the missing Rembrandt. His
lawyer later told him he has a “dangerous sense of play,” Gibbons said.
“I asked him if he knew someone looking for a Vermeer at cut-rate
prices.
“I would like to reconstruct it,” Gibbons said of
the heist. “I would re-enact it with the police uniforms. I don’t know
how far I could carry it.”
It wouldn’t be the first time Gibbons donned a police uniform for one of his films. In a scene from Confessions of a Sociopath, a camera pans up to reveal a mustachioed Gibbons in full police regalia.
In a sketch released by police after the Gardner heist, one of the suspects sports a similar mustache and look.
Think
about his criminal past, his films, his art theft, and an audience
might see Gibbons in that sketch. They might believe for a second he
could’ve been there, perhaps even with a video camera in hand, the night
$500 million of art vanished.
That’s exactly what he would want.

A federal judge has ordered another competency evaluation of Robert Gentile, the geriatric Hartford
gangster who authorities suspect is concealing information about
history's richest art theft, the heist a quarter century ago of $500
million in paintings and other works from Boston's Isabella Stewart
Gardner Museum.
The 81-year-old Gentile's lawyer expressed concern
about his mental acuity earlier this month, after he said Gentile was
confused and belligerent when he appeared in court in Hartford for
sentencing on weapons charges.
"Based on the representations of
defense counsel concerning the defendant's symptoms, there is reasonable
cause to believe he may presently be suffering from a mental disease or
defect that renders him mentally incompetent to the extent that he is
unable to understand the nature and consequences of the proceedings
against him or assist properly in his defense," U.S. District Judge
Robert N. Chatigny wrote in an order filed Thursday.
Gentile's
mental state has been a recurring issue in recent years, as FBI agents
hit him repeatedly with drug and gun charges, pressing him — without
success — for information that could lead to recovery of the works by
Vermeer, Rembrandt and others that disappeared after the 1990 robbery.His lawyer, A. Ryan McGuigan, said Gentile — who has been locked up for most of the last five years — has displayed signs of dementia
as his physical health has deteriorated in jail. In court earlier this
month, McGuigan said Gentile could not remember having pleaded guilty in
April to the gun charges and became angry when told he had.
Federal
prosecutor John Durham has suggested Gentile is feigning in an effort
to avoid another long prison stretch. Durham said that Gentile seemed in
control of his faculties in August when he was recorded on a telephone
call to his wife from the state jail in Bridgeport, where he has been held since another competency evaluation last spring.
Durham
said Gentile was able to explain to his wife why and how he would be
sentenced. He also asked her to have money deposited in his prison
commissary account, Durham said.
Chatigny ordered Gentile sent to a
federal prison medical center — preferably the institution at Butner,
N.C. — for a 30-day evaluation. How the court proceeds with the gun
charges will depend on the evaluation. It will be Gentile's second visit
to Butner.
His first was last year, after he became confused and
was reported to be near death from a variety of ailments — notably
obesity — while being held at a federal jail in Rhode Island. He made a
remarkable recovery and lost about 60 pounds, according to close
associates.
But they said his health has deteriorated and his
weight has increased since his release from Butner and return to the
Bridgeport jail.

Wednesday, September 06, 2017

The
sentencing on gun charges of Robert "The Cook" Gentile, suspected of
hiding information about the world's richest art heist, was postponed
Tuesday after his lawyer questioned the Hartford mobster's competency and a prosecutor accused Gentile of faking dementia to avoid another long prison sentence.
The 81-year-old Gentile's mental state has become a recurring issue in recent years, as FBI
agents have hit him repeatedly with drug and gun charges, pressing him —
without success — for information that could lead to recovery of $500
million in art stolen in 1990 from Boston's Isabella Stewart Gardner
Museum.
His lawyer, A. Ryan McGuigan, said Gentile — who has been
locked up for most of the last five years — has displayed signs of
dementia as his physical health has deteriorated in jail. On Tuesday,
McGuigan said Gentile could not remember having pleaded guilty in April
to the gun charges and became angry when told he had.
McGuigan
asked that the sentencing be postponed while Gentile is evaluated to
determine whether he understands the charges against him and is able to
assist in his defense. U.S. Judge Robert N. Chatigny delayed sentencing,
but said he will decide how to proceed at a later date.

Federal
prosecutor John Durham said in court Tuesday that Gentile sounds as if
he was in complete control of his faculties a month ago, when he was
recorded on a telephone call to his wife from the state jail in Bridgeport, where he has been held since last spring.

Robert Gentile,
the Hartford mobster and the last hope for recovery of paintings stolen
from the Gardner museum, is wheeled into the federal courthouse in
Hartford on Tuesday morning to be sentenced on gun charges. The
government could lose its leverage on getting Gentile to provide
information on where the art work might be once a sentence is imposed.(Patrick Raycraft / Hartford Courant)

Durham said Gentile was able to explain during
the conversation why and how he would be sentenced and asked his wife to
have money deposited in his prison commissary account. Then, in a
loaded disclosure almost buried in the argument over competence, Durham
said Gentile also told his wife that "he knows where one of the
paintings is" and wanted to talk to his lawyer about it.
Durham
refused to elaborate afterward on what he called Gentile's reference to a
painting. The prosecution offered twice to play the recording in court,
but Chatigny chose not to.
Outside of court, McGuigan attributed
his client's reference to "one of the paintings" to an almost laughable
string of statements that began with an unsupported assertion by one of
Gentile's fellow inmates — the kind of assertion McGuigan claims follow
Gentile, whose mafia membership and ties to the notorious Gardner heist
have made him a prison celebrity.

Robert Gentile,
the Hartford mobster and the last hope for recovery of paintings stolen
from the Gardner museum, is wheeled into the federal courthouse in
Hartford on Tuesday morning to be sentenced on gun charges.(Patrick Raycraft / Hartford Courant)

McGuigan said that the fellow inmate approached
Gentile in jail in August and claimed to have seen what appeared to
have been a stolen painting somewhere in upstate New York six years ago.
"Someone
approached him about a painting," McGuigan said. "He called his wife to
say he found the painting and needed to talk to me."
McGuigan and
others said they believe the painting to which Gentile referred is not
one of the 13 missing Gardner pieces — if it even exits.
Last
year, Chatigny ordered a competency evaluation after McGuigan raised
similar concerns. Gentile was judged competent, but the report by a
prison psychologist said his mental ability to understand and
participate in his defense could deteriorate if his physical condition
worsened.
No long afterward, Gentile collapsed late last summer in
a Rhode Island hospital and nearly died. He regained his health after a
long recuperation at a federal prison hospital and was transferred last
spring to a state jail in Bridgeport with a nursing facility.
Since
his transfer to Bridgeport, Gentile's physical health seems to have
again deteriorated. He is wildly overweight and was rolled in and out of
court in a wheelchair.
The discussion of what to do about Gentile
Tuesday turned on another notorious case, that of Vincent "The Chin"
Gigante, the former boss of New York's Genovese crime family who became
infamous for wandering around his Greenwich Village neighborhood in
pajamas and a bathrobe.
Gigante claimed he was demented. The
government claimed he was faking. Chatigny said in court Tuesday that
Gigante's judge decided he was somewhat incompetent, but not
sufficiently so to avoid being sentenced. In a compromise, Gigante was
ordered to serve a prison sentence at the medical center where Gentile
recovered.
Chatigny said he will decide between two options for
Gentile: Sentence him, as was the case with Gigante, to a specific
sentence in a prison medical center. Or, alternately, order a competency
evaluation and proceed from there. He asked the defense and prosecution
to submit arguments on the question.
Gentile, whose arrest record
dates to the Eisenhower administration, has been locked up for 41/2 of
the past 51/2 years on a succession of drug and gun charges constructed
by FBI agents pressing him — futilely, it has turned out — to cooperate
with their Gardner investigation.
He has remained mute. He
insists he knows nothing about the heist or the missing art — in spite
of old age, dire health, a $10 million reward, lousy prison food and a
growing body of evidence to the contrary, much of it consisting of his
admissions recorded by FBI informants.
Whether he is released
because of age and health or spends years more in prison, authorities
could lose any leverage they have over a formerly obscure gangster who
many believe once possessed, at least briefly, two of the stolen
paintings and is sitting on information that could jump-start an
investigation befuddled by a series of dead ends.
The FBI believes
it has identified the two Boston hoodlums — both now dead — who broke
into the museum early on March 18, 1990. Acting with inexplicable
violence, they battered frames from gallery walls and tore away
canvases. They drove off with 13 pieces, including Vermeer's "The
Concert" and Rembrandt's only known seascape, "The Storm on the Sea of
Galilee."
Gentile landed in the Gardner case 20 years later, in
February 2010. It happened when investigators interviewed the widow of
Robert Guarente, a Boston bank robber, drug dealer and, as it turned
out, longtime Gentile associate.
Guarente had moved to Maine after
his last prison sentence, for drug dealing, and died in 2004. In 2010,
the Gardner investigators suspected that he had, at some point, obtained
Gardner art from the gang that stole it. The investigators went to the
Maine woods in search of clues.
Guarente's widow, Elene, stunned the
investigators when, without being asked, she blurted out that her late
husband once had two of the Gardner paintings and that she had been
present at a Portland hotel when he passed the paintings to a longtime
associate from Connecticut — Gentile.
Gentile, to that point, was
hardly known. He had been ignored by organized crime investigators in
Connecticut as a knock-around hoodlum, undeserving of a spot on law
enforcement's priority list. Elene Guarente changed his life. He became a
target of intense investigation. It was learned that, while no one was
paying attention in the late 1990s, he and Guarente were inducted into
the mafia as soldiers on the Philadelphia mob's Boston crew.
Not
long after Elene Guarente's spontaneous declaration, the FBI issued a
rare public statement demonstrating, at least obliquely, its interest in
Gentile:
"The FBI believes with a high degree of confidence that
in the years after the theft, the art was transported to Connecticut and
the Philadelphia region, and some of the art was taken to Philadelphia,
where it was offered for sale by those responsible for the theft. With
that same confidence, we have identified the thieves, who are members of
a criminal organization with a base in the mid-Atlantic states and New
England."
In court and in interviews with The Courant, Gentile
denies everything. He acknowledges that he and Guarente were pals for
decades. He said they met at a used car auction in South Windsor. He
said he visited Guarente in Maine repeatedly. But Gentile insists that
neither he nor Guarente were members of the mafia. He said Guarente
never had any Gardner paintings. Gentile said he certainly never had any
and he has no idea who stole the art or what became of it.
No one
was predicting last week what Gentile's sentence will be. The
prosecution and defense filed memos with Chatigny outlining their
respective positions. Such memos are routine and are often filed in
public. They are sealed from public view, without explanation, like many
other filings in the Gentile case.
A public legal filing shows
that, under the advisory sentencing guidelines in federal court, Gentile
faces as much as 89 more months in prison for the gun charges and for
committing crimes while on supervised release from his previous
conviction. However, the court has discretion to sentence Gentile
beneath the guidelines if there is a strong argument about his age and
declining health.

The Irish Republican Army Holds The Key to America’s Most Famous Art Heist, Claims PI

Arthur Brand. Courtesy of Arthur Brand.
Arthur Brand, a private Dutch investigator known as the “Indiana Jones of the art world” is making headlines once again. This time, it’s because of a CBS This Morning news segment
in which he claims scientific certainty that a half-billion-dollar
trove of paintings stolen in 1990 is currently secreted in Ireland.
“I’m 100 percent sure that they are in Ireland. Hundred percent sure. No doubt in my mind,” Brand told interviewer Seth Doane.
He says he has “leads” that point him to the current
whereabouts of the masterpieces, taken 27 years ago during a nighttime
heist at the Isabella Stewart Gardner museum in Boston. And these leads
point him to the Irish Republican Army, or IRA.
“We have had talks with… former members of the IRA—and after
a few Guinnesses, after a few talks—you can see in their eyes that they
know more,” Brand claims.
The FBI and Gardner security director Anthony Amore reportedly still believe the paintings are in the US.
artnet News reached out to Amore following the most recent round of
headlines. In an email this morning, Amore said: “We have explored all
of the angles Arthur has mentioned many years ago, to their natural
conclusion. Today, there is not one scintilla of evidence pointing to
Ireland or the IRA. If Arthur has some new to share, I am always happy
to listen.”

Thursday, June 22, 2017

Art Hostage Comments:
Arthur Brand, claims in the article on Bloomberg, below he is negociating with former IRA members to recover the Gardner art.
These
leads are Irish drug dealers who work out of the Netherlands.
Furthermore,
Arthur Brand claims a Dutch criminal had photo's of the Gardner art
back in the 1990's and was trying to sell them in Europe. This criminal
was Michel Van Rijn and he sold them to Irish criminals, but sadly they
were copies/fakes and Michel Van Rijn scammed the buyers, who could not
get them authenticated for obvious reasons.
These fake Gardner
artworks have been passed through many hands over the years and if they
are ever recovered it will become clear very quickly they are good
quality fakes. Therefore no reward would ever be paid out and the reason
given will be because they are copies, true or false.
However,
this is not to say some of the original Gardner artworks might be held
by Irish people, but this latest attempt by Arthur Brand is chasing the
fake Gardner art sold by Michel Van Rijn.

Cracking the Biggest Art Heist in History

For
nearly three decades, detectives have sought to solve the theft of $500
million of artwork from the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston.
They think the end is near.

By

Nina Siegal

20 June 2017, 05:00 GMT+1

It’s still regarded as the greatest unsolved art heist of all time: $500 million of art—including works by Rembrandt, Vermeer, Degas, and Manet—plucked from the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston on March 18, 1990, by two men posing as police.
The
museum had offered a $5 million reward for the return of all 13 pieces
in good condition. Last month, the bounty was suddenly and unexpectedly doubled to $10 million.
For such a long-unsolved case, the investigation is surprisingly active into the disappearance of the artworks, which include paintings, a Chinese vase and a 19th century finial of an eagle.
Anthony Amore, the museum’s director of security, says he works on the
case every day and is in “almost constant contact” with FBI
investigators. Tipsters still call all the time, with leads that range
from the vaguely interesting to the downright bizarre. Among them:
a psychic who offered to contact the late Mrs. Gardner’s spirit, and a
few self-styled sleuths who reckon the paintings can be found with metal
dowsing rods.
Most of those go nowhere. Whether the works will ever be
recovered, or if they still exist at all, is one of the great questions
that has divided the art world.
“Those paintings are gone,”
said Erin Thompson, professor of art crime at the John Jay College of
Criminal Justice in New York. “Either because they were destroyed
immediately after they were stolen, or because they’ve already been
beaten up so badly by being moved around in the back of cars.”
But
there is one outside detective respected by Amore—Arthur Brand, a Dutch
private investigator—who believes not only are the artworks still
intact, but also that he can bring them home. This year.
“It’s
almost certain that the pieces still exist,” Brand told me. “We are
following two leads that both go to the Netherlands, and we are now
negotiating with certain people.”
Brand, 47, has
become one of the world’s leading experts in international art crimes. A
British newspaper once called him the “Indiana Jones of the art world”
for his combination of crack negotiating skills and uncanny instincts
for finding stolen art.
In the past few years, Brand has posed as the agent of a Texas oil millionaire to help Berlin police find two enormous bronze horses from the German Reichstag. He worked with Ukrainian militia members to secure the return of five stolen Dutch masters to the Westfries Museum in the Netherlands. He negotiated with two criminal gangs for the successful return of a Salvador Dali and a painting by Tamara de Lempicka, together valued at about $25 million, to the now-closed Scheringa Museum of Realist Art, also in the Netherlands.
Brand
acts as something of a liaison between criminals and the police.
Controversially, he’ll try to make deals that allow the culprits to go
free, because he says his primary goal is saving the art from the trash
heap.
“There are very few like him who understand the reality of this sort of crime,” Amore said.

“It’s the Holy Grail in the art world”René
Allonge, the chief art investigator with the Berlin State Office of
Criminal Investigation, said his team had been searching for Hitler’s
bronze horses since 2013. He contacted Brand at the end of 2014, met him
in 2015, and they conducted the investigation and searches jointly, “as
far as it was legally possible.” Ultimately, Brand played a
crucial role in the discovery of the bronze horses, as well as other
populist bronzes from the Nazi era, he said. “He succeeded in
penetrating a very closed scene of collectors of high-quality Nazi
devotionalia, where we finally found the sculptures that we were
searching for,” Allonge wrote in an email.
Brand’s
reward in some of these high-profile cases is often the glory and
nothing more. Scheringa had originally offered a €250,000
bounty ($280,000) for the Dali and Lempicka, but the museum had shut
down by the time they were recovered. Brand was paid an hourly fee and had his expenses reimbursed, though he declined to say by whom. For finding Hitler’s horses, he got no cash at all, just a lot of free publicity, he says.
“He’s
not the guy to charge you for every hour he works,” said Ad Geerdink,
director of the Westfries Museum, for which Brand recovered five
old-master paintings from a militia group in Ukraine. “He knew that we
are a small organization with not many resources, so the fee was very,
very friendly.”
The biggest bonus Brand’s ever
received for solving a case was about €25,000, he says. He adds
that he’s investigating the Gardner case for the glory. “It’s the Holy
Grail in the art world,” he said.

It’s estimated that only 5 percent to 10
percent of stolen art is ever recovered, largely because the works
are impossible to sell publicly.

“People will steal
art first and then think about what to do with it second,” said
Thompson, the art crime professor. “Often they’ll destroy the work of
art to get rid of the evidence.”
Shortly after seven
paintings by Picasso, Monet, Van Gogh, Gauguin, and others, valued in
the tens of millions of dollars, were stolen from Rotterdam’s
Kunsthal museum in 2013, they were burned by the mother of one of three
Romanian thieves arrested and charged in the burglary. She confessed to
investigators that she was scared after police began searching her
village.
Alternatively, paintings are used as bargaining chips in
criminal cases. That’s how Italian police recently located two stolen
Van Goghs.
In 2002, thieves broke into the Van Gogh
Museum in Amsterdam with a sledgehammer—just because they saw a weakness
in the museum’s security, not because they knew what they were after.
The opportunists sold the works for ‎€350,000 to alleged Italian mobster
Raffaele Imperiale. (The art was said to be worth tens of
millions—although it never came to market, so it’s impossible to know.)
In a seaside town near Naples, Imperiale stored the canvases in his mother’s kitchen cabinet
for a dozen years until prosecutors closed in. In August, Imperiale
disclosed their location in an attempt to improve his standing with the
courts, his lawyers, Maurizio Frizzi and Giovanni Ricco, told me.
Prosecutors subsequently reduced his sentence by about two years, they
said.

But often, the thieves are only persuaded to let go of works if
they think they’re going to sell them on the black market. This is where
someone like Brand can come in. In 2014, he created a character
to help solve the case of the missing Reichstag bronze horses. He
pretended to be an agent for “Dr. Moss,” a fictional American collector
who had gotten rich in the oil business, loosely based on the character
J.R. Ewing from the TV show Dallas. He has also posed as the
representative of princes and sheikhs, or even as a criminal himself.
“Whatever works, works,” he said. He draws the line at wearing costumes.
Brand says he almost never deals with the original
thieves. Stolen art tends to move through many hands. Sometimes, the
ultimate recipient doesn’t know that what they have was stolen.
“In
many cases, I have to deal with a person who has a problem: They’ve
been screwed by another criminal group,” Brand said. “They can either
pass art along to another criminal group, or they can burn it. That’s
even worse. What they won’t do is take the work to the police and say,
‘We found these Van Goghs.’ Because the police will ask where they got
them.”

“We’re not talking about murders here. If a big criminal has them or the Pope, it doesn’t matter”That’s
where Brand has an opportunity to become the middleman. He can promise
the sellers they won’t get in trouble, then get assurances that the
police won’t make arrests.
Brand’s style works
particularly well for snaring amateur crooks, said Noah Charney, founder
of the Association for Research Into Crimes Against Art. A lot of
people who steal art assume there are collectors out there who buy on
the black market, like characters in heist movies. In fact, almost none
exist, he said.
“People have always collected art to
show their erudition and to advertise their wealth,” he said. “If you
buy something that you know or suspect was stolen, you can’t show it to
anyone.”
Criminals don’t always know that. “They get
desperate and then turn to someone like Arthur Brand,” someone they are
willing to believe is the real deal, Charney said.

Six-foot-two,
with a shock of blond hair and bright blue eyes, Brand could be played
in the movie of his life by Liam Neeson or Ralph Fiennes. His sleuthing
is an adjunct to his primary and less dramatic job—helping buyers who
have been swindled, conned, or overcharged for art.

“About
70 percent of what I do is just in the office, visiting clients,
visiting dealers, talking to people, and saying, ‘Give him his money
back!’” he said. “The other 30 percent is walking around talking to
criminals, talking to police, informants, and going undercover
sometimes.”
Brand first became connected to the art world as a student,
through collecting ancient Roman and Greek coins. “I found out that
there were a lot of fakes out there, and I didn’t want to spend my
hard-earned money buying fakes,” he said.
In 2002,
Brand received the first of many tips, rumors, and leads about the
Gardner case. He heard that back in 1991, people in Holland had
photographs of the paintings in storage. By following up, he became
convinced that the paintings were never sent to the Netherlands, but
photographs were being circulated by people trying to sell the paintings
to someone there.
Sometime around 2010, he heard
that the works had ended up in the hands of former members of the Irish
Republican Army. But he soon suffered a setback with the death of one of
his top sources, a former IRA member.
Brand believes
the original thieves were small-time burglars who sold the pieces to a
criminal gang in the U.S. before they were killed in the early 1990s. At
some point in the mid-1990s, he thinks, the works were shipped to
Ireland by boat and ended up with top-ranking IRA commanders.
For
the past 12 years, Amore and the FBI have worked around a theory that
local gang members in the Boston area may have been involved. They are
fairly certain that the two thieves who committed the crime died shortly
afterwards, Amore said.
But Amore believes the works
are still in the U.S. “Art that is stolen in America tends to stay in
America,” he said. “I’d be happy to be proven wrong.”
The statute of limitations on the theft ran out in 1995, and
the Office of the U.S. Attorney for Massachusetts has considered
offering immunity for information that leads to its return. The museum
mostly cares about getting the works back, Amore said. That’s partly why
they raised the reward.
“It was important for the museum to show its commitment,” he said. “We’re telling the public this is how serious we are.”
Brand
says the higher reward may help speed things up. He isn’t convinced,
though, that the criminals involved will trust the FBI to live up to the
deal, despite his assurances.
“For me, it’s not
about getting people arrested,” he said. “We’re not talking about
murders here. If a big criminal has them or the Pope, it doesn’t matter.
The important thing is to get them back.”

Brand says this case could be cracked within months. He won’t elaborate, but if his leads are good, he’ll have to work fast.
Amore
also says that he and the FBI may be close to solving the case, and
they have leads that are “making the haystack smaller.” He, too,
declined to share specifics. “We feel we’re on the right path,” he said.
The FBI is more measured. “The investigation has
had many twists and turns, promising leads and dead ends,” said Kristen
Setera, an agency spokeswoman in Boston. “It has included thousands of
interviews and incalculable hours of effort. The FBI believes with high
confidence that we have identified those responsible for the theft, even
though we still don’t know where the art is currently located.”
Brand is confident he can find out.
“Somebody
I’m talking to knows something,” he said. “These people are not idiots.
They know that they can’t just hand them over and walk away with
impunity. They think even if they’ve been offered immunity, the police
will have some tricks up their sleeves. What I can do is I can provide
them a way to return the works without ever having contact with the
police. I can even promise them that they can get the reward.”
Would Brand really hand over $10 million?
“If I can be the one who can bring them to the museum,” he says, “give me a good glass of Guinness, and that’s reward enough.”—With assistance from Hugo Miller.

The trail had been cold for years when the FBI announced in
2010 that it had sent crime scene evidence from the Isabella Stewart
Gardner Museum to its lab for retesting, hoping advances in DNA analysis
would identify the thieves who stole $500 million worth of
masterpieces.
But behind the scenes, federal investigators
searching for a break in the world’s largest art theft were stymied by
another mystery. The duct tape and handcuffs that the thieves had used
to restrain the museum’s two security guards — evidence that might, even
27 years after the crime, retain traces of DNA — had disappeared.
The FBI, which collected the crime scene evidence after the heist,
lost the duct tape and handcuffs, according to three people familiar
with the investigation. Despite an exhaustive internal search, the FBI
has been unable to find the missing evidence, thwarting its plan to
analyze it for potential traces of the thieves’ genetic material,
according to those people, who asked not to be identified because they
are not authorized to speak publicly about the case.
It’s unclear
when the items vanished — although two people said they have been
missing for more than a decade — and whether they were thrown away or
simply misfiled, the people said.

The lost evidence marks another setback in an ongoing investigation
that has been plagued by the deaths of suspects, defiant mobsters,
fruitless searches, and a litany of dashed hopes. None of the 13 stolen
treasures, which include masterpieces by Vermeer and Rembrandt, have
been recovered, and no one has been charged.
The FBI declined to comment on the missing evidence, citing the
ongoing investigation, but defended its handling of the case. Harold H.
Shaw, the special agent in charge of the FBI’s Boston office, said the
bureau has devoted significant resources to the investigation, chased
leads around the world, and remains committed to recovering the artwork.
“The
investigation has had many twists and turns, promising leads and dead
ends,” Shaw said. “It has included thousands of interviews and
incalculable hours of effort.”
The FBI completed DNA analysis of some museum evidence in 2010,
according to Kristen Setera, an FBI spokeswoman. She declined to say
what items were tested or what, if anything, the tests showed.
The
heist remains one of Boston’s greatest mysteries. Promising leads have
led nowhere, leaving investigators at a crossroads. Most notably, a
seven-year effort to pressure a Connecticut mobster for information has
come up empty.
Robert Gentile, 80, faces sentencing in August on
gun charges but could walk free if he cooperated with federal
authorities, his lawyer said. Despite the enticement, and a hefty
reward, Gentile denies knowing anything about the stolen artwork.
Finding
the treasures may require a new approach, according to several former
law enforcement officials who worked on the case. They suggested that
investigators should restart the investigation from scratch and review
the evidence in a contemporary light.
Carmen Ortiz, who recently stepped down as US attorney for
Massachusetts, said authorities should shift their strategy, perhaps to
include appeals on social media, and expand the investigative team.
“Get
around the table with some fresh eyes, in addition to those who know
this case very well, to give it a new look,” Ortiz said. Ortiz’s
successor, Acting US Attorney William Weinreb, said the investigation
remains a top priority.
A former assistant US attorney, Robert
Fisher, who oversaw the Gardner investigation from 2010 to 2016, said
investigators should “go back to square one” and study the crime as if
it just happened, analyzing each piece of evidence with the latest DNA,
fingerprint, and video technology.
“What if it happened last
night, what would we do this morning to try to crack this case?” said
Fisher, an attorney at Nixon Peabody.
Told that the Globe had
learned the duct tape and handcuffs left behind by the thieves were now
missing, Fisher said he hoped they would be found.
“Frankly, it
could be enormously helpful,” Fisher said of the missing items. “I think
present-day forensic analysis of evidence like that could lead to a
break in the case.”
However, he said the tape may yield no viable DNA, depending on its condition.
Anthony
Amore, the museum’s security director, said investigators are pursuing a
number of new leads following last month’s announcement that the reward
for information leading to the recovery of the artwork had doubled to
$10 million until year’s end. Dozens of tips were received, he said.
“I
operate in the realm of hope,” said Amore, who has worked with the FBI
and US attorney’s office on the investigation for nearly 12 years. “We
are never going to stop looking for these paintings.”
The brazen heist — the largest property crime in US history — occurred in the early morning hours of March 18, 1990. Two
thieves disguised as police officers claimed to be investigating a
disturbance when they showed up at the museum’s side door on Palace Road
in Boston’s Fenway neighborhood. They were buzzed inside by a
23-year-old security guard, who, by his own admission, has never been
eliminated as a suspect.
The thieves wrapped duct tape around the
hands, eyes, and mouths of the two guards on duty, then left them
handcuffed in the museum’s basement as they spent 81 minutes slashing
and pulling masterpieces from their frames.
In the days after the
robbery, FBI and Boston police crime scene analysts scoured the museum
for clues. They lifted partial fingerprints from the empty frames but
found no matches in the FBI database.
At the time, DNA evidence was in its infancy. But scientific advances have since opened new doors for investigators, cracking unsolved cases across the country.
DNA experts said it’s possible the thieves’ DNA couldbe
pulled from the duct tape, although the chances are slim. Success
hinges on a number of variables, such as how the evidence was preserved
and how many people handled it while freeing the guards and storing it.
“Certainly
people have retrieved DNA from samples that old, but how much you can
get is the big question,” said Robin Cotton, director of the Biomedical
Forensic Sciences Program at the Boston University School of Medicine.
Analysts
would also need DNA samples from the police officers who removed the
tape to distinguish their DNA from the thieves, Cotton said.
Tom
Evans, scientific director of the DNA Enzymes Division at New England
Biolabs, an Ipswich firm that conducts DNA testing, said technology has
come so far that it may take only a single cell to identify someone
through DNA analysis. But DNA breaks down over time, especially in hot
or humid conditions.
“Twenty-seven years later, it might work and it might fail,” Evans said.
The
statute of limitations on the theft expired years ago, but authorities
could still bring criminal charges for hiding or transporting the stolen
artwork. The US attorney’s office has offered immunity in exchange for
the return of the paintings.
Four years ago, the FBI announced it
was confident it had identified the thieves — local criminals who have
since died — and had determined that the stolen artwork traveled through
organized crime circles from Boston to Connecticut to Philadelphia,
where the trail went cold around 2003.
In 2010, the FBI began
focusing on Gentile after the widow of another person of interest in the
theft, Robert Guarente, told agents that her late husband had given two
of the stolen paintings to Gentile before he died in 2004.
Federal
authorities allege that Gentile offered to sell some of the stolen
paintings to an undercover FBI agent in 2015 for $500,000 apiece. They
remain convinced that he is holding back what he knows.
However,
Gentile’s lawyer, A. Ryan McGuigan, said his client insists he has
nothing to offer investigators and recently told him, “They could make
the reward $100 million and it wouldn’t change anything because there
ain’t no paintings.”
Another person who has come under renewed
scrutiny in recent years is Richard Abath, the guard who opened the door
for the thieves. A Berklee College of Music dropout who played in a
rock ’n’ roll band while working at the museum, he has steadfastly
maintained that he played no role in the heist.
Authorities have
said that motion sensors that recorded the thieves’ steps as they moved
through the museum indicate they never entered the first-floor gallery
where Manet’s “Chez Tortoni” was stolen. Only Abath’s steps, as he made
his rounds before the thieves arrived, were picked up there, they have
said.
Steve Keller, a security consultant hired by the museum,
said he tested the motion sensors after the theft and determined they
were reliable. He said he entered and left the room several times where
the Manet had been stolen, even crawling on his hands and knees in an
effort to avoid detection. Each time the sensors detected his presence.
Abath declined to comment.
Former
US attorney Brian T. Kelly, who previously oversaw efforts to recover
the Gardner artwork, said he remains hopeful the masterpieces will be
recovered.
“All it takes is a new lead that leads in a new direction and a lucky break or two,” Kelly said.Shelley Murphy can be reached at shelley.murphy@globe.com. Follow her on Twitter @shelleymurph. Stephen Kurkjian can be reached at stephenkurkjian@gmail.comArt Hostage Comments:
So many false leads, controlled oposition etc.
The FBI insist any Gardner art recovery is done on their terms and includes arrests/indictments etc.
The Gardner Museum has also been bullied into towing the line therefore any reward includes conditions that allows refusal of reward payment, for example the insistance on all the art work being recovered in "Good condition" before any reward would be paid out.

The museum’s trustees also felt they were being kept in the dark about
the status of the investigation. Trustee Francis W. Hatch, Jr. recalled
one meeting held ostensibly to gain a briefing from the agent and
supervisor on the case. “They wouldn’t tell us anything about what they
thought of the robbery
or who they considered suspects,” Hatch recalls. “It was
very embarrassing to all of us.”

"Hatch
convinced the trustees that the museum needed to hire a fi rm to
investigate, and stay in touch with the FBI on its probe. IGI, a private
investigative firm based in Washington begun by Terry Lenzner, who had
cut his teeth as a lawyer for the Senate Watergate Committee, was put on
retainer, and the executive assigned to the case was Larry Potts, a
former top
deputy in the FBI. Fearful that their authority was being undercut, the FBI’s
supervisors
in Boston complained to US attorney Wayne Budd, who fired off a memo
warning the museum that it faced prosecution if it withheld information
relevant to the investigation. Hatch responded, saying in his letter
that he
was “shocked and saddened” by Budd’s attempt to “intimidate”
the museum and that it cast “a pall over future cooperative efforts.”
From Master Thieves by Stephen Kurkjian

Wow! It's almost as if one of the thieves was untouchable,
like because he was the star witness testifying in a German court in absentia
against the ringleader of the longest running spy ring in American history,
Clyde Lee Conrad, and was also implicating himself and two other spies he
himself had recruited, at that time, like Boston area native Rod Ramsay, or
somebody like that.

"In
addition, more than thirty paintings, valued at $200 million, that
Imelda Marcos had allegedly purloined from the Metropolitan Museum of
Manila, including works by Rubens, El Greco, Picasso, and Degas, were
being stored by Khashoggi for the Marcoses, but it turned out that the
pictures had been sold to Khashoggi as part of a cover-up. The art
treasures were first hidden on his yacht and then moved to his penthouse
in Cannes. The penthouse was raided by the French police in a search
for the pictures in April 1987, but it is believed that Khashoggi had
been tipped off. He turned over nine of the paintings to the police,
claiming to have sold the others to a Panamanian company, but
investigators believe that he sold the pictures back to himself. The
rest of the loot is thought to be in Athens. If he is found guilty, such
charges could get him up to ten years in an American slammer."

Some of the Gardner art may have reached the Middle East, making it much harder to recover.
Some of the Gardner art may be in terrible condition preventing any recovery because any reward would be negated by this, see Gardner museums conditions of recovery in "Good condition"

The Gardner case has been a political tug of war, with all sides refusing to give an inch.Food for thought:
If they believe the thieves are deceased why did they only just recently
stipulate that the thieves are not eligible for the reward?

From this article: "Plagued by the deaths of suspects,
defiant mobsters."

Beat that local toughs theory into the ground Boston Globe. Last month the FBI
said the know who the guy in the video is, but they're not saying if he was
there for a legitimate reason or not. So obviously he wsa there for an
illegitimate reason. And he most certainly is not a local tough so the whole
local tough or any kind of mafia type theory is thoroughly discredited.

Abath has no known associations with local toughs and this guy talking to ABath
is not a local tough or any kind of mafia type. Kurkjian reported in November
of 2015 that four security guards said it was retired Lt. Colonel and Gardner
Security supervisor Larry O'Brian, which is ridiculous, but it points to the fact
that by his haircut, clothing, and comportment, this was a guy who could be
mistaken for a security supervisor. Could Donati, or DiMuzio, or Reissfelder,
be mistaken for a security supervisor by security guards on a surveillance
video? I don't think so.

There has never been a scintilla of evidence supporting that theory. The whole
theory was just a full employment for program FBI agents and their friends in
journalism. And the dead suspects were just convenient props who would not be
able to stand up for themselves, be publicly vetted or file a lawsuit.

Notice that Mashberg doesn't say they look like the police sketches. Nor does
Kelly get quoted saying that. How absurd? It's like trying to translate the
Soviet house organ Pravda into Russian.

In the Globe's article about the Powerpoint 3/17/15, a couple of weeks later,
Shelley Murphy, evidently couldn't bring herself to mention Leonard DiMuzio by
name. Can you blame her? DiMuzio, the victim of an unsolved homicide, was an
honorably discharged Marine Corp corporal, and a Viet Nam vet. He does NOT
resemble the police sketch. The New York Times described him as a
"skillful burglar" which probably means they had not caught him yet.

Reissfelder, a bad check writer, who liked to talk like a tough guy spent 16
years in prison for a robbery/murder he did not commit and was exonerated.
After he got out in 1982, he slept with the lights on.

But get ready for the real "CATCH" from this article by Murphy about
Reissfelder

"The catch: Reissfelder was 50 at the time of the heist, and the guards
estimated one thief was in his late 20s to early 30s and the other was in his
30s. However, Kelly said he doesn’t believe the age estimates were
reliable."

So Kelly says he thinks that two guys in their twenties one a 27 year old with
a Master's Degree from the New England Conservatory can't differentiate between
someone in their 30's and a 51 year old drug addict who had spent half of his
adult life in Walpole State Prison.

And Robert Gentile is the only "defiant" mobster. He says he didn't
do it. Stephen Kurkjian says he wasn't involved. Kurkjian's name is on this
article. How is Gentile's defiance any kind of "plague?"

The I.T. Revolution did not end yesterday morning and it is not ending tomorrow
morning. Get real. The paintings may or may not come back but the truth about
who did it is coming out. It was not local toughs.

The Boston FBI conducted the "investigation" the
way they were told from higher up, in Washington from the beginning. It's time
for Washington to leave Boston alone on this now.

“The place is so wonderful now that we tend to forget what a horrendous thing
it was to have happened,” [back then Governor Michael] Dukakis recalled
recently. “The wearing of police uniforms always bothered me, and then the
SEEMING difficulty of being able to identify them.”

Hawley too, he said, has shared with him and his wife, Kitty, a very close
friend, her frustration that the FBI has been unable to recover any of the
stolen pieces. “She’s frustrated, HIGHLY SKEPTICAL about a lot of the stuff,”
he said. “She’s gotten tired with everything. Enough already.” from Master
Thieves by Stepehn Kurkjian

Dear Washington: Enough already!!!

This was not made public until 2013:

"We also were threatened by criminals who WANTED attention from the FBI
Nobody knew really what kind of a cauldron we were in." Anne Hawley
12/4/13https://youtu.be/WwnQs1BvvlU?t=44

What kind of criminals WANT attention from the FBI?

I don't know what kind of cauldron we're in, but from the smell of it, I think
I know what it is we're sharing it with.

Who cares? I mean it is bad, but they already know who did
it. This seems like a diversionary, gaslighting, in-emergency-break-glass,
non-story designed to regain control of the narrative by pumping up pointless
data with media steroids and pumping it out into the information stream on
this.

CNN was somehow compelled or persuaded to re-write an article about the Gardner
Heist reward being doubled to ten million written by Charney. They didn't
acknowledge any errors, but they did put in this disclaimer:

You can see Charney on American Greed Season Two Episode Nine "Unsolved:
$300 Million Art Heist / Preying On Faith" on Hulu matter of factly
contradicting the FBI's Geoff Kelly who appears on the same episode to discuss
the Gardner Heist https://www.hulu.com/watch/46551#i0,p5,d0

Then on Friday Emily Rooney smeared Charney at the end of the show, describing
this established art theft expert incompletely as an art novelist, and one who
is indifferent to facts, and whose original story had "ten egregious
errors." But Rooney has not said what any of the errors were and CNN is
not doing a correction. So all we have for egregious errors in the public
domain is Rooney's description of Noah Charney's professional background,
character and ability to render facts on paper for a news story. https://youtu.be/jmfXv-MT8nM?t=344

And the Gardner Heist story is one place where this rivalry is playing itself
out. It is a prelude to what appears to be just how things are going to be for
a while and getting rid of Trump is not going to solve it.

Charney's story (the current version) suggests that raising the reward is an
act of desperation. One thing we know is that the suggestion of a Boston Globe
editorial from the time of 25th anniversary is unlikely to be considered no
matter how hopeless things get in this 27 year old saga: